The Virtual Memories Show

Jan 29 2025 693 ep. 74 mins 509
The Virtual Memories Show Podcast artwork

A weekly conversation about books and life, not necessarily in that order.

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Episode 623 - Matt Madden

Jan 29 2025 81 mins  
Cartoonist Matt Madden rejoins the show to celebrate his new collection, SIX TREASURES OF THE SPIRAL: Comics Formed Under Pressure (Uncivilized Books). We talk about the liberation to be found in formal constraints, his history with OULIPO and its OUBAPO offshoot, how structure can inspire story, and the formal and thematic challenges in sequencing the stories in the collection. We

Episode 622 - Fred Kaplan

Jan 20 2025 63 mins  
After 4+ decades as a reporter and with a half-dozen nonfiction books under his belt, Fred Kaplan rejoins the show to celebrate his first foray into fiction, A CAPITAL CALAMITY (Miniver Press)! We talk about how lockdown got him to start A Capital Calamity, how his history in national security and the defense sector informs the novel (& its accidental march torward WWIII), how his

Episode 621 - Mia Wolff

Jan 14 2025 84 mins  
With THE EMPTY LOT (Fantagraphics Underground), artist Mia Wolff brings together 100 paintings from more than 40 years of her oeuvre. We talk about how she found the thread & structure for the book, the patterns that emerged as she re-ordered the pieces and stitched them together with new illustrations, comics and prose pieces, and how you can make a joyride of a monograph by intro

Episode 620 - Damion Searls

Jan 07 2025 96 mins  
Translator & author Damion Searls kicks off our 2025 season with a talk about his amazing new book, THE PHILOSOPHY OF TRANSLATION (Yale University Press). We talk about how all writing — translation or not — involves constraints, he balanced the book between philosophical argument and concrete examples of translation, and how he came to define translation as "reading one thing

Episode 619 - 2024 Recap

Dec 30 2024 50 mins  
It's the end of the year, so let's take stock of 2024 with a big ol' year-in-review monologue! Your intrepid/decrepit host, Gil Roth, gets personal while talking about what he's learned from the podcast & his guests this year, how they continue to change each other's lives, the moment he found his Spirit Jacket, his communion with a Roman sculpture, the validation of his year-long

Episode 618 - The Guest List 2024

Dec 22 2024 63 mins  
Twenty-two of this year's Virtual Memories Show guests tell us about the favorite books they read in 2024 and the books they hope to get to in 2025! Guests include Roland Allen, Shalom Auslander, Laura Beers, Sven Birkerts, Mirana Comstock, Leela Corman, Nicholas Delbanco, Benjamin Dreyer, Eric Drooker, Randy Fertel, Sammy Harkham, Frances Jetter, Ken Krimstein, Jim Moske, Robert P

Episode 617 - Benjamin Swett

Dec 17 2024 91 mins  
With The Picture Not Taken: On Life and Photography (NYRB), Benjamin Swett brings us a subtly beautiful series of essays that explore memory and identity and what we really see in the viewfinder. We talk about the role of photography in his life, how Musil, Sebald, and Knausgaard and taught him to trust digressions, the freedom to be found in the essay, how working in the NYC Parks

Episode 616 - Ken Krimstein

Dec 10 2024 71 mins  
LIVE from Labyrinth Books, artist and vulgarizer of history (in the French sense) Ken Krimstein returns to the show to celebrate his new book, EINSTEIN IN KAFKALAND (Bloomsbury)! We talk about the mystery of the 15 months Einstein & Kafka overlapped in Prague, how the two of them invented the modern world, what Ken has learned about graphic storytelling after 3 books, how the theor

Episode 615 - Eddie Campbell

Dec 06 2024 87 mins  
Cartoonist & historian Eddie Campbell returns to the show with his fantastic new book, KATE CAREW: America's First Great Woman Cartoonist (Fantagraphics Underground), which explores turn-of-the-(20th)-century artist, cartoonist, illustrator, caricaturist, interviewer & journalist Kate Carew. We get into how Eddie discovered Kate's work while researching The Goat-Getters, how Kate w

Episode 614 - Caitlin McGurk

Nov 26 2024 62 mins  
Comics librarian and curator Caitlin McGurk returns to the show to celebrate her amazing new book, TELL ME A STORY WHERE THE BAD GIRL WINS: The Life and Art of Barbara Shermund (Fantagraphics). We talk about Caitlin's shock at her 2012 discovery of Barbara Shermund's incredible gag-comics and illustrations in the archive of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, how her intere